The Lawsuit
So, what happened? Nothing really, the BHA argued that there
is ‘clear evidence’ that homeopathy works in these specific cherry-picked cases
(or something less biasedly worded) to which the judge responded that it wasn’t
his job to review the evidence. Which was a good decision on the judges’ part, he
is not a scientist, nor any scientific authority. The NHS however, is a medical
authority, with the power to review and make evidence-based decisions. Fortunately,
the judge ruled in favour of the NHS, stating that the processes they followed
to stop funding homeopathy was ‘fair and balanced’ and stated that there was no
evidence of bias in their decisions.
Sadly, the fact that it even got this far is an impingement
on science. Anyone can claim that they have been biased against when things don't go their way. This has cost
a strained NHS because someone was upset that their pseudoscience has been proved
to be just that; pesudoscientific nonsense. Following logic and evidence (albeit, better late
than never) doesn’t make you biased against something, it makes you a better
thinker. Anyone with an inch of critical thinking would arrive at this
conclusion. Does that make them biased?
If your answer is ‘yes’, why? The main lobbying of this from
the BHA was that the NHS was ‘closed-minded’. Homeopathy is quite clear cut, it doesn’t work, it hasn’t been proved to work and the lack of evidence has
forced the NHS to firstly review it and then secondly, stop plying money into
it. Not only did they appeal this decision, but they attacked the basic unity
of quality control and testing within medicine. Attacking and trying to dismantle the entire foundations
that the standards of care we have in the UK today. We have it pretty good here,
we don’t have an ‘anything goes’ system. The NHS works off of science and
evidence, to get both of these you need the scientific rigour with which our
healthcare standards are built upon, eroding those foundations will lead to a
collapse in healthcare in general. All this to sell literally fake medicines
and make money off of a dying breed of pseudoscience? There’s no low to which
people like this will not stoop too. £92,000 per year was funded to the homeopathy
referrals through the NHS (you can see why BHA are clearly hurt about this money-making
pseudoscience declining) for treatments that are not proven to have any effect.
In fact, it probably cost more than that when they came back to their NHS
doctors because whatever issue they had, unless it was dehydration, persisted. Their
website however, still has the link to how to be referred. This does have a disclaimer
on it, basically saying that funding has been cut, and that you can harass the
NHS with calls for a formal complaint to them.
“It appears NHS England can fail to engage
with patients properly on removing services and get away with it…That is not
good enough, for it is important to remember that the real losers in this case
are the patients who are now being refused a treatment on which they have come
to depend.”
I’m sure they will thank the NHS when they look back in a
few years and discover that it was the chemotherapy off of the NHS that let
them live, not expensive water. They get to live, they are not the losers. The real
losers are the people scamming patients and making money from selling pseudoscience.
This is a great victory for the UK in science, medicine and critical thinking. This victory will cut off a lot of funding for the homeopathic community. Hopefully cutting them off at the knees like this will only enable them to crawl on a little bit. Now, if we could roll this thinking out to the rest of the world and kill this off
once and for all, that would be great. Sadly, I don’t see that happening
anytime soon.
